Overall Ticket Sales Are On A Downward Trajectory
When Celtic Park is packed, everyone’s a hero. The Strategy gets credited with full houses and swelling bank accounts.
The manger and his players are secondary to the real geniuses, those in the boardroom.
That’s how it’s spun anyway.
But if this triumph is the province of only a small number, then disaster belongs to us all.
Never before have I seen a more clear demonstration of flipping an old aphorism on its head.
It’s failure that has a thousand fathers at Celtic Park.
Success belongs to Peter.
That failure is best manifest in the number of empty seats, and the reasons for that are, allegedly, so numerous that no one person can be blamed or held accountable. Everything from the absence of a team called Rangers, to the absence of a challenge, to the general malaise of Scottish football, even the unrealistic demands of supporters and the economic downturn … nowhere is there a recognition that fans are just fed up with a lack of ambition at the club.
Oddly enough, none of these things appears to bother the supporters of other teams.
Aberdeen and Hearts are packing them in, despite not realistically believing they can win things. Sevco has been playing in front of full houses almost every week since being formed in 2012, even whilst clawing its way up from the bottom tier. The absence of a challenger for four out of five years hasn’t affected them one bit. The general malaise of Scottish football? Hell, they were playing against part time teams for the most part, teams without a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out.
How is it that other clubs appear to be on the up and up whilst the biggest in the land stagnates?
Why can they fill their stadiums whilst we’re closing parts of the stand?
Even some of our European nights have been played in front of empty seats … when did you ever know that to happen?
What was the cause?
No team called Rangers in our Europa League group?
The question as to why so many of our fans are voting with their feet is one our board appears completely unwilling to answer. When the CEO speaks about it in public he offers variations on the above themes. When he talks about in private, it’s alleged that he thinks the “return of the Old Firm” will solve all these problems and re-fill Celtic Park.
Such arrogance and complacency is what got us a half empty stadium in the first place.
What’s the magic number below which our season ticket sales have to drop before those above Lawwell start questioning exactly what it is he’s presiding over?
20,000? 10,000? Unrealistic, you might say … but those empty seats don’t lie, and this season a whole lot of them were already bought and paid for before fans started finding better things to do with their weekend afternoons.
You think it’s not dawned on some of them that they could continue doing those things, only with an extra £500 in their pockets, plus change?
Those empty seats are all potential non-renewals.
That should be scaring people at Celtic Park a lot more than it seems to be, and the man responsible for coming up with a strategy to fill those seats appears to believe that all he has to do is wait until the blue half of Glasgow can field a team to challenge us.
Doesn’t it make you want to rush out and hand over your dosh?
No, me neither.